Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

“State symbol kinda thing,” the cabbie ground out.

“Yeah, but what’s a buckeye?”

He pinned us with red little eyes through the rearview mirror.

“It’s a poison nut.”

Trix gave me a wry little smile. “That makes sense.”

The hotel was a concrete island. Surrounded by highways on all sides. You couldn’t walk anywhere from it. The cab dumped us at the front door. The driver was shivering with tension by this point, hissing constantly under his breath, getting close to explosion. I paid the guy a tip. He suddenly glared at Trix and lost it, yelling at the top of his lungs: “They bleed for a week and don’t fucking die!”

The cab tore off. I looked at Trix, who just shrugged. “Can’t argue with that,” she said.

Check-in was unremarkable, and within ten minutes we had our big apartment-style rooms four floors up, complete with exotic widescreen views of the parking lot.

I flicked on the TV for noise while Trix settled in to her room. Some mumbling defective in a cowboy hat was doing a radio talkshow that was inexplicably being televised live. The gig appeared to consist of several perky underachieving assistants doing all the talking while the old guy took his hat off, put it back on, and wondered what the microphone in front of him was for.

There was blood in the toilet, which didn’t bother me as much as it probably should have. I flushed a few times, but it seemed to me that the bottom of the bowl had some kind of wound through which blood continually seeped. There were weird cracks and ripples in the enamel down there. If you squinted through the refraction of the water, the sequence of little lines looked a bit like a hand. I floated some toilet paper over the top and decided to leave it alone.

Trix banged on the door, and sauntered in eating an apple. “It’s like housesitting your old-fashioned aunt’s place, these rooms.” She looked around my room, spotted the little plastic Scotch bottles already drained. “Are you okay, Mike?”

“Fine.”

I’d fished the handheld out of my bag already; passed it to Trix. “You want to check out our Columbus lead?”

“Ooh, yeah. Gimme.”

She spilled into a chair like a rag doll, holding the apple between her teeth as she clicked the machine open and started thumbing the keyboard.

When she said, “Oh, this is going to be fun,” I ordered a full-sized bottle of whiskey from room service.

Comeon over,” said the guy on the phone, sounding disturbingly reasonable.

“See?” said Trix, finishing some elaborate eye makeup in the bathroom mirror. The toilet bubbled and hissed behind her. “Physical adventurism doesn’t make you an instant freak.”

“Did you read this file? Did you read what these people do to themselves? It’s a freakshow.”

“It’s an interest . I’m looking forward to meeting the guy.”

“For your thesis, right?”

Trix bounced out of the bathroom. Leather boots, flouncy lacy skirt thing, tight top. I decided not to look at her for long.

“Yes, for my thesis. Also because I think he’s going to just be a genuinely interesting guy. Does he know why we’re coming?”

I put my hand on my jacket. It seemed heavy. It wanted me to stay right where I was. Stay there, lay down, drink some more, develop some kind of horrific paralysis that prevented me from ever leaving. That required nurses to look after me. Lots of them. With elaborate eye makeup.

I picked up my jacket.

“Yeah, I told him. Figured I may as well be up-front about it. He didn’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

“Can’t argue with that. Are we going?”

I had a rental car waiting outside. It had stained baby clothes and a crack pipe on the backseat. I put my hand inside a plastic bag I found in the glove compartment and carefully lifted them out, dumping it all into a FedEx dropbox outside the hotel lobby. A FedEx employee once tried to steal my breakfast. I hold grudges for decades. Frankly, if I didn’t hold grudges, I’d have nothing to play with on Christmas Day.

Trix had gotten the handheld to connect to the Web and produce a road map from the hotel to the location of the man on the phone. I pulled the rental car out of the lot and started following the red line from here to there. Within ten minutes, we were off the highway and barreling up and down leafy suburban hills fringed by big-porched houses stabbed by flagpoles from which bedraggled Stars and Stripes bled.

Trix took it all in like she was riding across the face of the moon. “People really have flags?”

“Sure.”

“Now that’s weird.”

“Yeah, but you’re from New York.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“People in New York are either New Yorkers, or they’re Spanish, or Italian, or Irish, or whatever. Who the hell moves to Williamsburg and says, Hey, I’m an American ? Hell, even after 9/11, if you wanted to tell someone they were being a good guy, people were saying, ‘You’re a hell of a New Yorker, buddy.’”

“Well, what about you?”

“Well, I’m from Chicago.”

Trix snorted.

We nosed out of flag country into parking-lot territory. The standard-issue skyscraper-shape cityscape of Columbus resolved into view, off in the distance. Bland and generic as it was, I wanted to be there. But we had to follow the red line into the tangle of housing out there. To see the man who’d been traded the book for a night of “physical adventurism.”

Iparked outside the address, a well-kept place that’d had the front yard cemented over into parking spaces. This was a guy who had a lot of friends. His neighbor had an old Impala rotting in the yard next door. It looked like God had shat in it—the roof punched in, the interior filled with earth and weeds. A brown sneaker poked out of the bottom of the dirt in the doorless passenger side. The sneaker looked worryingly full.

My guy’s door chime was blandly anonymous. We waited out there for a couple of minutes, not talking. I was on the verge of giving up when I heard heavy footsteps inside the house. The door flew open and there was a large mahogany man wearing a purple towel standing there, grinning widely.

“You’re the guy who called earlier?”

“Yeah. I’m Mike, this is Trix.”

“Yeah? Very cool eye art there, miss. C’mon in. Bit of a rush here.”

The air inside was warm and salty. The place was pin-clean and retrotasteful, like someone had embalmed my grandmother’s house in 1976. He walked ahead of us, muscles moving under his skin like cats under a satin bedsheet. He was heavily built, and the weird artificial-looking mahogany brought out his muscle definition. He brought us into an old lady’s living room, laid a spare towel over the sofa, and sat, inviting us into big armchairs that smelled of old potpourri. He gave that big open grin again, big white teeth gleaming in his shaven mahogany head.

“I’m Gary. You got to excuse my look, I just got back from a bodybuilding show. No time to shower.”

He pressed his fingertip into his forearm and drew a line down it, exposing white skin.

“Body stain. Brings out the shape under the lights. I compete.”

“Did you win?” Trix smiled.

“Ah, second place. Three hundred bucks. I do it for the extra cash, and three hundred’s better than a kick in the ass, right? I got this great trainer, English guy, but he’s pissed at me because I don’t stay in the gym all damn day. He’s got this picture he carries around with him from when he competed himself. Him in first place, some other guy in second, Arnold Schwarzenegger in third. He says to me, ‘I got first and lived on nothing but fresh pussy for the next two years. Arnie got third and lived in the gym and worked his guts out. And now he’s the governor of California and I’m training you, you arsehole.’”